Watched Eat, Pray, Love yesterday and had a hormonal meltdown not even 1/16 through, which resulted in snotty sniffles and unintelligible gibberish about “running out of time” while Tony sat beside me, patient and bewildered, stroking my hair.

The nutty: wasn’t because of any grand Elizabeth Gilbert epiphanies (in the form of the delectable Jules) that came snaking out from the screen before me to soccer-punch my sensibilities. Hardly. Like all nutties – and pimples – I think I had been ticking along for a good while, and I probably rented something as rama-rama-ding-dong and self-indulgent as EPL to perhaps find the words and the impetus to throw a dribbly and pathetic tantrum – which I further ruined by repeated admissions that I was probably sloshed with mumsy hormones, sodon’tmindme.

So what set me off? There is the one freaky coincidence – the fact that the author, at age 31, had known her first husband for 8 years and been married for 6 before she went epiphanising. But that’s where the similarities end. Unlike her, I loved turning 30 and it didn’t loom over me like a death sentence. And as much as “having a baby is like getting a tattoo on the face” (irreversible and kind of a big ask, commitment-wise), I think I’m ready. Or at least, more ready emotionally and spiritually than she was.

Still, there is a smidgen of something in all her moaning that I can identify with whole-heartedly. The quest for self. The awful sense of ending something in my life and embarking on something new and wholly irreversible. Have I given my freedom my all? Did I capitalise on my independence? Will I regret the fact that we didn’t do a round-world trip and spent oodles of cash, cashing up on experience instead? Would I have days where I’d yearn to trade in the child for a semblance of my former self and life?

The thing is, I have exactly 15 weekends left before my due date. Less, if you count the fact that I will be a beached whale in June. And I am – we are – investing the last vestiges of our precious couplehood fixing the computer and watching re-runs instead of living big and loud. Stupid, I know. My days are a mind-numbing hamster run of meetings and frustrations and stress and cracking the whip and balls in the air… but in the grand scheme of things, they are not what matter. Not even to the people who gave me the balls in the first place. How Ecclesiastic.

15 weekends, before Tony and I cease to be just Tony and I. Yesterday, I mourned its impending end for the very first time. It’s time to grow up.